What your freedom needs

No more shackles

My word for 2014 is freedom.

It's one thing to say it's a big undiscovered word for a whole year.

BUT....

It's completely another thing to live in your word.  So how does a follower of Christ live in freedom?

Here's what I found...you stop looking for it and you speak it to every part of your life, your being, your spirit, and believe that it IS yours.  

I'm not a freedom seeker any more but a freedom speaker.

Yes, my language has changed.  In my search for freedom in each and every part of my life, in my soul, in my heart, in my thinking I have found the opposite of freedom to be true.  

That's when it hit me there was an absence of freedom until I allowed God to invade my soul, my heart, my mind with His perfect freedom.

I had to do something, and in obedience I speak freedom to the things that have held me captive.

Do you realize how captivating God's words are when are a slave to the lies of the enemy?

The Bible is a like a liberating wholistic truth that will make you re-think the ways you have thought about your entire life.

2 Corinthians 5:10  "We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

I wrestle with lies just like you.  I wrestle with freedom from sin just like you.  I wrestle with truth just like you.

But from my wrestling, God has shown me victory in so many areas of freedom that I am not a slave to wrestling with it anymore.  Why would we want to wrestle with freedom, when it's so free and available for all?  My mind is sore and raw from being chained from the lies of the enemy who wants me bound and powerless.

So how did I get free?  How do you get free?

I put my way of thinking before judge Jesus.  I marched my lies that I had been living in to the big wooden bench of God and asked in prayer...was this right?  was this true?  is this necessary?

Guess what the verdict was....

Slavery is a argument dressed in very attractive clothes that smothers and opposes right thinking.  It binds us from the truth that we need to live a life of freedom.  It oppresses our brains with half-truths that shut us down to remain overwhelmed and bound to fear.  We tend to succumb to the mental and emotional prison of a dark, damp cell with our thoughts going deeper and darker to depression.

Being bound by the lies of the enemy is a very dark and dangerous place.

That's why freedom is so great, God's truth frees us.  It's freeing me.  It can free you.

I challenge you to take the lie that Satan is whispering to your heart right now and march it up to God's word and ask the same wrestling question of "true-right-necessary".  Tell me in the comments on what God shows you as you lay that out before Him.

God's truths are the key to your chains, nothing compares to the freedom that He has for all of us.  You say you don't know where to start?  Read Ephesians.  All of it, the whole book, in different versions.  You will find a great start of freedom there to dispell the lies we have swallowed in regards to holy living.

(Let me know when you are done wrestling with Paul's version of freedom, then I'll direct you to more freedom.)

If you believe in God, then He is at the end of your struggles, issues, hiccups and hang-ups.  His truth will pave the way to your freedom, but you can't just pin it there and walk away.  You have to speak freedom God's way into your life.  

And you have to walk by faith and believe God for your freedom.

I know that God is my perfect freedom that gives life to my freedom.  My language changed from being bound and seeking freedom, to speaking freedom into my life and living in perfect freedom everyday.

That doesn't mean that I don't wrestle still, but I'm applying the truth that is victorious in my soul, my heart, and my mind.  My mind has been renewed and revived by wrestling and applying victorious freedom God's way.

The verdict of slavery all boils down to letting God into our issues and showing us our sin and then speaking life to it.

I am free.  That means I am believing by faith that freedom has been won on the cross.  My sin, my cross, my freedom was won in the sacrifice of Jesus.  The cross of Jesus is mine, and for my freedom, for my reconciliation.

My freedom is in Christ.  Christ is free, I am free because Christ dwells richly within me.

Speaking freedom to myself is life-giving and renews my slave thinking into God's freedom with His renewed thinking.  

Romans 12: 2 "Don't copy the the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.  Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect." (NLT)

Proverbs 18:21  "The tongue can bring death or life; those who love to talk will reap the consequences."  (NLT)

Freedom is mine and it can be yours.  Speaking it to yourself will change your language too.

I am not a freedom seeker, but a freedom speaker.  This song speaks freedom to me.